Friday, Nov 17, 2000 5:42 PM UTC

The naked and the dead

Kate Winslet gives necrophilia a whirl, big bum and all; Kate Moss gets robbed -- and sad. Plus: Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas push the tacky envelope, and Babs gets sued by an accused stalker.

By Amy Reiter

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Topics: Celebrity, Spice Girls, Entertainment News

You think your job is hard? Kate Winslet had to dabble in necrophilia for her last gig.

I’m dead serious.

“And, well, that’s a hard type of scene to do,” Winslet says in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine of her role in the film “Quills,” about the Marquis de Sade. “I mean, sex with a corpse — that’s a bit much. And then you add in that it’s a priest, having sex with a corpse, in a church. You couldn’t get more controversial if you tried.”

Did I mention that she is the naked corpse? “Lying on a slab with no clothes on was hard,” Winslet admits, “but the scene was not gratuitous.”

It’s a distinction she believes is essential, and one that helps her get over periodic concerns that “my bum is fat.”

“Everyone always asks me about nudity because I guess I’ve taken my clothes off in almost every movie I’ve done,” she says. “But in each case, the nudity has been there for a reason. Frankly, I hate every second. But I can’t stand seeing a film and thinking, Why is that woman having sex in all her clothes? She should be naked.”

Regardless of the size of her bum.

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Look who’s winning the push/pull

“These women that drive me crazy … drive me crazy because I can be having dinner in a fancy restaurant and all of a sudden she stands up in the middle of the table and she starts dancing. Who doesn’t like that?”

– Ricky Martin on why he likes “dangerous women.”

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A British Kate who’s got it even harder

The latest skinny on Kate Moss? She wuz robbed.

The superslender supermodel’s London home was apparently broken into while she was on a two-week vacation in the States — and the burglars made off with about $500,000 worth of swag, according to the U.K. Sun. Among the items taken: a $30,000 necklace given to her by ex-boyfriend Johnny Depp.

“Even though she and Johnny broke up two years ago, the necklace was significant to her. It held a lot of emotional memories” as the “first gift” he gave her, a “friend” of the model told the Sun.

“Johnny was the first love of her life. She’s particularly upset at losing the necklace because of what it means to her,” said Moss’s chatty buddy. “It’s like losing a piece of herself.”

And you know, there’s not much of her to spare.

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Men are from Mars …

“[I would] never date a businessman. Put that in print. They’re civilians. I’m of the alien nation of actors. I am proud to be an alien, and I’m only really comfortable with fellow aliens.”

– Glenn Close on why she only dates thespians, in the Calgary Sun.

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Oh … ick

Melanie’s rehab: the miniseries?

Melanie Griffith has begun posting a “recovery journal” on her cheesy Web site “because I wanted to share … my experiences” with “my friends.”

In her first post since checking in, Griffith writes, “I have been in recovery for one week. If you don’t know about it, I was and still am addicted to sleeping pills (barbiturates) and pain pills (opiates) … I am still a little shaky, but I feel it is important that I share this with you, because an addiction to prescribed pain pills can happen to anyone, and you have to be careful.”

Got that?

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Juicy bits

Has Bruce Willis’ interest in action films died hard? Well, he told a group of reporters this week, “I haven’t lost my passion for action films, I’m just bored with them. The genre has run itself into the ground. I’m waiting for the action movie to reinvent itself.” What, like as romantic comedy?

What is up with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas and money? Last week, the buzz was that the couple had asked guests invited to their wedding on Saturday to hang onto those silver tea trays and crystal decanters and instead give them the gift of cold, hard cash — to be set aside in trust for their baby son, Dylan, of course. And now, the U.K. tabs are reporting that the green-grabbin’ lovebirds have signed a $1.5 million deal with OK! magazine, allowing them exclusive rights to the wedding pics — this after they auctioned off the rights to publish the first photos of little Dylan for a million clams. With a wedding this lucrative, they may want to make it an annual event.

Turns out what the Spice Girls want — what they really, really want — is their real names back. The artists formerly known as Baby Spice, Posh Spice, Scary Spice and Sporty Spice have made it clear to reporters that they should henceforth be referred to as Emma Bunton, Victoria Beckham, Melanie B. and Melanie C., respectively. OK, so they don’t want their entire names back.

Barbra Streisand, funny lady? Tabloid photographer Wendall Wall doesn’t think so. Wall is suing Streisand, James Brolin and the Malibu, Calif., sheriff’s department, claiming that after the couple accused him of stalking them back in January, he was arrested without probable cause and falsely imprisoned on $1 million bail. “This is a man who pursued us with his camera unrelentingly for years,” Streisand and Brolin said in a statement. “But, in fact, we never requested his incarceration.” That’s too bad, because I understand that people who need to incarcerate people are the luckiest people in the world.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

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